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The Challenges of a Kurdish Ecofeminist Perspective: Maria Mies, Abdullah Öcalan, and the Praxis of Jineolojî
Abstract
Ecology, along with women’s liberation and radical democracy, is one of the major pillars of Democratic Confederalism, a new political paradigm developed by the Kurdish Freedom Movement through the voice of the PKK’s leader, Abdullah Öcalan. Scholars attribute the greening of the Kurdish agenda to the impact that the founder of Social Ecology, Murray Bookchin, had on Öcalan’s ideology. Without denying the veracity of this argument, the following article analyzes the influence that Maria Mies, a pioneer of socialist ecofeminism, had on the philosophical elaboration of Öcalan. Examining the theses exposed in his prison writings with the most relevant aspects of Mies’ thought, this article shows the limits, challenges, and strategic use of the Kurdish ecofeminist perspective. This approach provides an original understanding of the emancipatory horizon opened up by Democratic Confederalism and particularly by Jineolojî, the “science of women and life,” spearheaded by the Kurdish Women’s Movement since 2011.
... Women began redefining their identities through expressions of agency and forms of empowerment with collective action, emphasizing struggle, resistance, and cooperation (Piccardi, 2022). With the knowledge and religious experience of ecofeminism, as shown earlier, indigenous women can transcend the barriers of human-nature interactions that irresponsible parties dominate. ...
This study aims to analyse the indigenous women's movement to protect nature using the perspective of religious ecofeminism. The Indigenous People Alliance of Indonesia (Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara-AMAN) documented 13 cases of indigenous territory seizure, affecting 103,717 indigenous people and 251 hectares of indigenous territories. Consequently, the patterns of indigenous knowledge related to spirituality, as lived by indigenous women, prompt them to respond to the exploitation of nature. This research seeks to confirm the basic thesis of ecofeminism that links the domination of women and nature. The study employs qualitative methods, utilising text data from online media such as Twitter. The selection of data sources is based on the role of online media as a space for the representation of indigenous women and indigenous peoples. The main findings indicate that indigenous women have successfully positioned themselves at the forefront of nature protection through their movements. The indigenous women's movement to protect nature exemplifies a relationship based on indigenous understanding and knowledge, which is inseparable from the interpretation of nature itself. Equally important, the response of indigenous women reflects the interpretation of humans and nature as interdependent entities that provide sustenance, a concept known as religious ecofeminism. This concept embodies a cultural and religious understanding of the cosmology of life. The study contributes to raising awareness of the critical role of indigenous women in environmental conservation and demonstrates that their movements are grounded in religious ecofeminism values.
... More specifically, as the above analysis engages with decolonial feminist critique (Lugones 2010;Piccardi 2021), I have sought to deface patriarchies shaped upon different local and similar global matrices of coloniality. The "coloniality of power", according to Quijano (2000), seems to be located in the complexity of overlapped hegemonies, but equally in the counter power of the powerless. ...
This study introduces a comparative framework to understand patriarchal genealogies and technologies, with reference to an anthropological commentary concerning the broader forms of coloniality of power between dominant male and dominated female bodies in Greece, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. It argues that the patterns of patrilineality, practices and representations of male honor, and female exclusion from the native family are literally and symbolically feeding on the matrix of patriarchal coloniality in the regions. The analysis is based on representative ethnographic research and historical approaches. Patrilineal kin structures, customs of captivity (i.e., bride kidnapping, sworn virgins, and honor crimes), and generalized practices of young virgin exogamy seem responsible for women’s minor status in the social stratification. Traditional hierarchies and modern social inequalities seem to motivate dispositions and regulate behaviors for female, minor, subordinate, and dispossessed bodies, as well as dominant male protectors and patriarchs. The text adopts a postcolonial and decolonial black feminist critique. It argues that in a longue durée process, a palimpsest pattern of patriarchy emerges, made upon the habitus of gendered ideology. Shaped by patriarchalism, paternalism, and patronage, patriarchy motivates a generalized pattern of coloniality within post-Ottoman geographies, thus regulating multiple material and symbolic inequalities, and even multiplying antagonistic hierarchies among family units, communities, central nation/state, periphery, and borders.
... Building upon Maria Mies' concept of housewifization, Öcalan argued that capitalism led to women's domestication within the household and, through the institution of the family, to the exploitation and devaluation of their "lifeproducing work'" (as Mies defined it), which had been at the center of the Mother-Goddess societies of the Neolithic age (Piccardi 2021). Since, according to Ocalan, "to enslave man, the system first had to enslave women", the emancipation of women is "essential to understand and generate the emancipation of the whole society": this is what makes Democratic Confederalism a "sociology of freedom" for the Middle East (as Kurdish scholar and activist Azize Aslan explained to us 2 ). ...
This article explores the significance of Jineolojî, an emancipatory praxis elaborated by the Kurdish Women’s Movement, for contemporary degrowth and pluriverse politics. Considering Jineolojî as the most original dimension of the Democratic Confederalist model of government in Northern and Eastern Syria (compared to other revolutionary projects), the article contributes to recent debates around the central place of “depatriarchization” in pluriverse debates. In the first part, we highlight a renewed interest in matriarchy, which has emerged at the intersection of ecofeminist with post-development and degrowth thought, noting how this resonates with the rediscovery of Mesopotamia’s matristic culture, which has been key to Democratic Confederalism and its radical critique of capitalist modernity and the nation State. We also highlight the inherent contradictions of the matristic model and formulate the question whether, and under what conditions, it bears potential for emancipatory political ecologies. The second part briefly describes the article’s sources and method, namely militant ethnography carried out with the Kurdish Women’s Movement, both in Rojava and in the European diaspora, cross-referenced with an analysis of some key texts of Jineolojî. The third part investigates the process by which the matristic perspective is being currently performed in Rojava through Jineolojî: a pedagogy for women’s self-defense, the autonomous re-appropriation of communalist and ecological praxis, and men’s liberation from hegemonic masculinity. We conclude that Jineolojî does not configure as a model of society to be recovered from a pre-patriarchal age, but as an original tool for liberating social potential towards gender, decolonial and ecological revolutions.
... A necessidade de formular um projeto crítico de reinterpretação coletiva da ciência, voltado para a transformação social, aproxima a jineolojî da teoria feminista crítica e sua caracterização sobre as particularidades do ponto de vista dos oprimidos. Por isso, a ciência das mulheres se desenvolveu a partir das iniciativas e experiências da organização do movimento de mulheres do Curdistão, e diz respeito diretamente ao processo de subjetivação das mulheres curdas e serviu como ponto de virada do movimento (Piccardi, 2021). Com o tempo, foi incorporando diferentes movimentos, tornando--se elemento estruturante das organizações vinculadas ao movimento de libertação nacional do Curdistão e do autogoverno na Federação Democrática do Norte e Leste da Síria. ...
A proposta deste artigo é discutir as particularidades do movimento de mulheres no Curdistão e a sua contribuição no que concerne os debates sobre formas alternativas de democracia. Partimos do pressuposto de que essa experiência, junto com outras trajetórias identificadas com o feminismo decolonial e o feminismo negro, está redimensionando a luta das mulheres enquanto vanguarda de um novo tipo de movimento emancipatório. Os resultados deste estudo indicam que as ações de empoderamento e de benefício mútuas promovidas pela geração de redes associativas, incentivadas pela organização autônoma dos quadros femininos na guerrilha, alteraram a autopercepção das mulheres nas comunidades curdas. Desta forma, as dinâmicas de poder social e político previamente existentes na região vêm sendo modificadas.
... This has produced a variety of comprehensive overviews (Cemgil and Hoffmann 2016;Colsanti et al. 2018;Jain 2016;Knapp, Flach, and Ayboga 2015;Schmidinger 2018;Sunca 2021;Yegen 2016) as well as more focussed studies dealing with specific dimensions of the revolution and their wider significance for global social struggles. This includes the cooperative economy (Sullivan 2018), social ecology (Hunt 2017), (eco)feminism (Piccardi 2021;Tank 2017), anarchism (Rasit and Kolokotronis 2020), and the republican philosophical underpinnings (Cemgil 2016). While revealing important aspects of the transformation in Northern Syria, few of these have included a systematic reflection on the wider geopolitical conditions within which these political experiments take place and even fewer have done so through a critical lens (Galvan-Alvarez 2020; Küçük and Özselçuk 2016;Leezenberg 2016). ...
South Africa faces several massive, interconnected challenges that reverberate through its political economy, society and education system. This paper offers lessons for the current conjuncture by exploring radical democracy and educational experiments in two other contexts: Brazil, as a point of close comparison, and Rojava (northern Syria), as a point for dissimilar comparison but which offers a “real utopia”. The Brazilian student movement (2015–16) involved several waves of mass school occupations in the “student spring” (primavera secundarista), with students demanding free, quality public education and, within the occupations, experimenting with democratic, dialogical, caring educational spaces. The Revolution in Rojava, emerging in 2012 and continuing to date, offers an alternative model of social organisation guided by women’s liberation, ecological harmony, and “Democratic Confederalism”, a form of anti-capitalist radical democracy. It has provided fertile ground for a profoundly different education system from the statist, authoritarian models previously imposed in the region. This paper draws out several prominent themes from each context, drawing these into conversation with the contemporary South African context. First, the movements demonstrate the pedagogical importance of language and culture, history and social dynamics, the decommodification of education, feminism and ecology. Second, they highlight the political importance of education for self-organisation in relation to broader processes of social transformation.
The Foucauldian concept of power-knowledge has been a useful lens to study the idea, discourse, and practice of development. Since the 1980s, many scholars have employed this critical framework to unearth the overlooked power relations created and altered by the concept of development in general, and development projects in particular. This article contributes to this debate by advancing and enriching this perspective. Analyzing a broad number of official sources supporting Turkey’s Southeastern Anatolia Project (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi, GAP) and drawing theoretically on the concept of power of Michel Foucault and absences of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, we argue that GAP is part of a state strategy to produce southeastern Turkey by design and the representation of lack. We develop a framework that helps us understand the narratives on the project as a design of absences, a design-power that works as a particular form of power-knowledge. In the terrain of absences, design has become the way to exercise power together with the observation of geography and population. The absences created by the development discourse become a key-feature of design-power. In this sense, GAP is design-power to produce a new region and new subjectivities and works as a particular form of power-knowledge.
Bajo los principios de la Ecología Social, el Confederalismo Democrático ha propiciado que sus protagonistas consideren ineludible su adscripción al sistema de comunas y cooperativas a través de las cuales se está creando un modelo sustentable de producción y, hasta ahora, el logro más representativo de este proceso es la creación de Jinwar, la única aldea ecológica de mujeres. A pesar de ello, el proyecto económico/ecológico de Rojava también enfrenta una serie de dificultades que ponen en peligro su subsistencia.
Women have been central to the revolution in Rojava, leading to widespread interest in the Kurdish women’s movement across Western contexts. Yet Western mass media representations of women combatants tend to be objectifying and superficial, glossing over the unique variety of feminism, known as “jineology,” that is core to the political system of Rojava, which operates according to the ideology of “democratic confederalism.” This paper is intended as a corrective to the inadequate representation of the theory and praxis of the women’s movement in Rojava. It approaches this task by: (a) critiquing the popular representation of women in Rojava, and (b) providing an overview of some of the features of the distinctive feminism that are in operation, with a focus on intersectionality, autonomous spaces, and combatting masculinity.
Kurdish women fighters of the Women’s Protection Unit, YPJ (Yekîcneyên Parastine Jin) received considerable attention in Western Europe and the United States. They made the headlines of mainstream newspapers and magazines. The emergence of an all-women, secular military force in the Middle East initiated a multi-layered process of conditional recognition of the Kurdish struggle – a ‘recognition’ in the sense of wide media coverage, but ‘conditional’ since it sought to divorce the feminist approach from its very specific political narrative and then reconnect it with Western liberalism. This paper critically delves into questions of a gendered geopolitics that portrays the Kurdish (feminist) struggle in the US popular discourses while silencing the voices of women and ignoring its historical roots and development. Based on an analysis of articles published in The Washington Post, New York Times, and Newsweek about the struggle for Kobane, we discuss the ways in which geopolitics, Orientalism and gender are interrelated in reports about this struggle. One of our main conclusions is that not despite, but rather through, the portrayal of Kurdish women fighters as heroines–even as angels–the idea of the Middle East was reproduced as a geography of fear, backwardness, and violence. The images of Kurdish women fighters may have superficially appeared to suggest a recognition of their struggle, this is a recognition that works through the presentation of images (portrait) at the expense of silencing the voices of the actors engaged in a struggle for a project that envisages a non-statist democracy. Although the portrayal of this struggle in Western media, in which the image of struggling women is disconnected from their politics, does not contribute to a recognition of their struggle, the women’s enunciation of their struggle in historical and political terms pushes the door for the audibility of Kurdish women’s voices.
The transformation of the Kurdish Freedom Movement towards Democratic Confederalism has promised a new horizon for emancipatory political organisation. This article examines the relationship between Bookchin's political theory of communal-ism and Öcalan's democratic confederalism informed by various lived practices of the Kurdish Freedom Movement. After situating this movement in the geopolitics of the contemporary Middle East and international relations, the article explores the social and historical framework of Bookchin's theory and its specific rejection of hierarchy that has been taken up conceptually and politically by Öcalan. We trace this in the dissolution of the PKK and the adoption of the new paradigm of democratic confederalism. The second part examines this organisational basis of the Kurdish Freedom Movement's in its support for local, autonomous, and federated, forms of direct democracy and the complementarities between Bookchin's and Öcalan's theorisation of communalism and confederalism. Finally, we look at the regional and international organisational and political implications of the transformation of the Kurdish Freedom Movement in its shift away from Marxist-Leninism, nationalism, and statism, towards communalism and examine both the challenges and opportunities facing this revolutionary process.
In this introductory article to the special issue Women and War in Kurdistan, we connect our topic to feminist theory, to anthropological theory on war and conflict and their long-term consequences, and to theory on gender, nation and (visual) representation. We investigate Kurdish women's victimisation and marginalisation, but also their resistance and agency as female combatants and women activists, their portrayal by media and scholars, and their self-representation. We offer herewith a critical perspective on militarisation, women's liberation, and women's experiences in times of war and peace. We also introduce the five articles in this issue and discuss how they contribute to the study of women and war in two main areas: the wide-reaching effects of war on women's lives, and the gendered representation and images of war in Kurdistan.
Feminist scholars have documented with reference to multiple empirical contexts that feminist claims within nationalist movements are often side-lined, constructed as ‘inauthentic’ and frequently discredited for imitating supposedly western notions of gender-based equality. Despite these historical precedents, some feminist scholars have pointed to the positive aspects of nationalist movements, which frequently open up spaces for gender-based claims. Our research is based on the recognition that we cannot discuss and evaluate the fraught relationship in the abstract but that we need to look at the specific historical and empirical contexts and articulations of nationalism and feminism. The specific case study we draw from is the relationship between the Kurdish women's movement and the wider Kurdish political movement in Turkey. We are exploring the ways that the Kurdish movement in Turkey has politicised Kurdish women's rights activists and examine how Kurdish women activists have reacted to patriarchal tendencies within the Kurdish movement.
This paper surveys the nascent experiments in political ecology underway in predominantly Kurdish areas of south-eastern Turkey, known as Bakûr, and Rojava (northern Syria). The Kurdish freedom movement is attempting to consolidate a social revolution with ecology at its heart in a most unpromising context, given its ongoing struggle against Islamic State and regional embargoes. This greening of its ideology can be significantly attributed to the influence of American social ecologist Murray Bookchin, an inspiration for Kurdish attempts to implement democratic confederalism, which comprises principles of direct democracy, gender equality and ecological well-being in a needs-based economy. The Mesopotamian Ecology Movement has emerged from activist campaigns opposing dam construction, climate change and deforestation in the region, to inform ecology councils tasked with formulating policies that reflect this philosophical paradigm shift. The essay considers the prospects for the ecological initiatives in Turkish and Syrian Kurdistan. It argues that, confronted by formidable challenges, expansion of the democratic confederal model beyond the heartlands of Bakûr and Rojava, and international solidarity, are preconditions for their endurance.
This paper traces the ideology of democratic autonomy, as developed by PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan from the libertarian and anarchist writings of Murray Bookchin, as an alternative to the authoritarian and centralist nation state, not only in the Kurdish-inhabited provinces, but in Turkey at large. It explores, first, the ideological underpinnings and second, the practical implementation of democratic autonomy both in south-eastern Turkey and in north-eastern Syria, or Rojava. Divergences between the two, I will argue, are not merely the result of contradictions between ideology and practice, or of the PKK’s enduring Leninist vanguardism, but also arise because the ideology itself remains ambiguous or implicit on the questions of party organization and the legitimacy of armed resistance. These ambiguities help to account for the apparent tension between grassroots anarchism and Leninist centralism in democratic autonomy, not only in practice but also in theory.
It is difEcult to identify the boundaries of what constitutes ecofeminism as both a field of critical theory and as a politics. Ecofeminism is constituted by, and draws upon a diverse range of political and theoretical projects including environmental studies, critiques of science and modernity, development studies and a rsnge of feminist critical writing and activism. Nevertheless, it can be argued that there are several common themes that run through most ecofeminist writing. These include: a critique of patriarchal science, a concern with the degradation of 'nature/the enuronment and the making of links between these two and the oppression of women. The publication of Mies's and Shiva'sEcofeminism (1993) marks a notable attempt to bring together these diverse strands, including those themes common to most ecofeminist texts, which the authors consider to constitute a definitive basis on which an ecofeminist politics can be constructed. Ecofeminism is a collection of twenty essays, some of which have been published elsewhere and most of which draw upon earlier work. The book has been widely reviewed, largely due to the international profile of its authors and their long history of engagement in feminist political debate. Maria Mies is perhaps best known for her book Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (1986); Vandana Shiva has received much acclaim for her book Staying Alive (1989). These earlier works clearly inform the multi-stranded agenda of Ecofeminism. It is our view that Ecofeminism is an important collaboration at a number of levels. First, it represents an attempt to elaborate a dialogue between a Western feminist and 'Southern' feminist standpoint in which some differences and many commonalities emerge. Second, the themes of the book respond to the current and growing interest in how global or international processes are gendered. Third, the book embodies and
In countries that have experienced large-scale displacement, compensating the losses of victims raises unique challenges for governments. The difficulty of designing and implementing a reparations program is further elevated in a context where displacement was both on a massive scale and forced, where the displaced have been subject to serious human rights abuses by security forces and where these incidents occurred is an armed conflict. The economic, administrative, and legal challenges affiliated with the design and implementation of a mass-scale compensation program for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of victims are exacerbated by the complexity of political and legal issues associated with prosecuting state agents.
The forced displacement of more than one million individuals in Turkey in the context of the armed conflict between the Turkish armed forces and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is a prime example of this situation. After years of denial of state responsibility, in an effort to enhance its chances for EU accession, the Turkish government adopted a compensation law for the displaced in 2004. Being one of the few countries actually compensating the displaced for their economic losses, Turkey has often been pointed to by the international community as an exemplary case. Yet, a close study of the government’s policies on displacement in general and the compensation law in particular shows that the international community has prematurely hailed Turkey for its compensation scheme for the displaced. Furthermore, the limited reparative efforts of the Turkish government took place in the absence of a political solution to the Kurdish question or a “transition” to peace.
Drawing on the lessons drawn to be learned from the Turkish case, this paper aims to reflect on the challenges of designing and implementing an effective reparations program for the displaced in situations where the root causes of displacement are still valid.
Stuart Rosewarne's comment on our essay ''We Want Our Land Back,'' underlines the need for clarification of the relationship between the exploited, both waged and unwaged, on the one hand, and between all within the hierarchy of the exploited and capital, on the other. Hence, our response addresses the fundamental struggle between classes over enclosures of the commons and the defense (and extension) of life-centered, subsistence relations. 1 To bridge the divide that Rosewarne identifies between ecosocialism and ecofeminism, we proceed by critiquing James O'Connor's analysis of the ''second contradiction of capitalism,'' offering an alternative perspective*gendered, ethnicized class analysis. The Hierarchy of Labor O'Connor stopped short of theorizing the gendered class interests and social power arising from the experience of women in general, as well as the experience of women and men who are peasants, migrant laborers, casual and part-time workers, or otherwise outside the waged relationship of proletarian labor. O'Connor marked but did not transcend the limitations of capitalist hegemony. Taking his silence as our starting point, we develop a counter-hegemonic framework to reveal the specific gendered class interests of those individuals and groups whose labor is primarily defined by the relationship of producing goods and services needed for the reproduction of their own labor power and the labor power of others. We argue that these unwaged (but exploited) workers have a direct interest in preventing capitalist commodification of communal relationships, the environment and public space. Furthermore, they have a unique social power to appropriate and abolish the technical and political divisions of the working class in the struggle against capitalist enclosure.
Formulated in the 1980s and gaining prominence in the early 1990s, by the end of that decade ecofeminism was critiqued as essentialist and effectively discarded. Fearing their scholarship would be contaminated by association with the term "ecofeminism," feminists working on the intersections of feminism and environmentalism thought it better to rename their approach. Thirty years later, current developments in allegedly new fields such as animal studies and naturalized epistemology are "discovering" theoretical perspectives on interspecies relations and standpoint theory that were developed by feminists and ecofeminists decades ago. What have we lost by jettisoning these earlier feminist and ecofeminist bodies of knowledge? Are there features of ecofeminism that can helpfully be retrieved, restoring an intellectual and activist history, and enriching current theorizing and activisms? By examining the historical foundations of ecofeminism from the 1980s onward, this article uncovers the roots of the antifeminist backlash against ecofeminism in the 1990s, peeling back the layers of feminist and environmentalist resistance to ecofeminism's analyses of the connections among racism, sexism, classism, colonialism, speciesism, and the environment. Recuperating ecofeminist insights of the past thirty years provides feminist foundations for current liberatory theories and activisms.
The article engages with the question of self-governance and its implications for the concept of citizenship in Rojava. A short overview of the historical development of the political idea of democratic autonomy applied in Rojava is given, a model that claims to be on the way to creating a stateless model of radical democracy whose realisation involves forms of emancipation of the citizen, from a subject of a state to an active participant. The social contract and the structure of self-governance in Rojava is examined from this perspective, and the conclusion drawn that citizenship, which has been seized by the statist model, is currently being reclaimed by the people in Rojava through democratic autonomy. The process of change of citizenship is being effected through participative action and self-education as acts of citizenship and aims to separate the idea of government from the idea of the state.
Jineolojî, the women's science proposed and developed by the Kurdish Women's Freedom Movement, has become central to its transnational organizing both in the Middle East and in Europe and the Americas. Activists in the Kurdish women's movement critique positivist and androcentric forms of knowledge production as well as liberal feminism. They instead propose Jineolojî, which aims to rediscover women's histories and restore women's central place in society. Based on a series of interviews with Kurdish women involved in developing Jineolojî, this article first situates Jineolojî within wider transnational and decolonial feminist approaches and then draws out the main ideas constituting Jineolojî. We focus on the ways Jineolojî speaks to ongoing discussions within transnational feminist knowledge production. Our article critically assesses the claim of Kurdish women activists who present Jineolojî as a new science and paradigm that goes beyond feminism while developing our argument that Jineolojî represents an important continuation of critical interventions made by marginalized women activists and academics transnationally. Moreover, our article illustrates that Jineolojî provides a helpful ideological underpinning for and epistemology of Kurdish women's political struggle for gender-based equality and justice.
The concept of Anthropocene has been incorporated within a hegemonic narrative that represents 'Man' as the dominant geological force of our epoch, emphasizing the destruction and salvation power of industrial technologies. This Element will develop a counter-hegemonic narrative based on the perspective of earthcare labour – or the 'forces of reproduction'. It brings to the fore the historical agency of reproductive and subsistence workers as those subjects that, through both daily practices and organized political action, take care of the biophysical conditions for human reproduction, thus keeping the world alive. Adopting a narrative justice approach, and placing feminist political ecology right at the core of its critique of the Anthropocene storyline, this Element offers a novel and timely contribution to the environmental humanities.
The Kurdish movement in post-1980 Turkey successfully mobilized Kurdish women. Themes related to gender equality have gained importance especially in late 1990s, when Kurdish women started to participate actively in the Kurdish movement. In the same period, the mythological sources of Kurdishness as a political identity were changed. Building on feminist studies exposing the interaction between ethnic/nationalist processes and gender relations, this article aims to examine the Kurdish movement’s ideological discourse from a gender perspective. By analyzing Öcalan’s writings during the 1978-1999 period, the article argues that there is a mutual interaction between the Kurdish movement’s ideological political and women’s agency in political participation. The paper shows that the left-wing and secular characteristics of the Kurdish movement facilitated women’s participation in the movement and that women’s participation affected both the importance of gender equality within the ideological and political discourse of the Kurdish movement and within its organizational structure. The paper concludes by pointing out the limits and contradictions of the movement’s discourse on gender equality.
This book offers the first historical account of Kurdish women’s politicization in Turkey, starting from the mid-1980s. Çağlayan presents a critical feminist analysis through women’s everyday experiences, incorporating women’s self-narrations with her own autoethnographic reflections. The author provides an account of the socio-political dynamics which constrained women’s politicization, of the factors and mechanisms which enabled their political activism, and of the construction of women’s political history through their own narrations. Women in the Kurdish Movement is a highly original contribution to Kurdish women’s political history. It will be key reading for students and scholars across various disciplines with an interest in gender, political participation, everyday resistance, feminist methodology, nationalism, ethnicity, secularism, social
movements, post-colonial studies, and the Middle East.
Handan Çağlayan is a Visiting Scholar, Department of General Linguistics, Bamberg Otto Friedrich University, Germany.
This paper will attempt to rethink Samir Amin's concept of delinking in terms of selective delinking and selective engagement. The notion of delinking is perhaps Samir Amin's most distinctive contribution to alternative development, as well as to a vision of a new kind of politics. Inspired by the ideas of Abdullah Ocalan, this talk will focus on stateless (con)federalism seen as an active dialectical engagement with the modern capitalist world-system, an active process of (dis)engagement capable of modifying the conditions of capitalist world-economy.
The Kurdish women’s movement is involved in an active militant struggle against ultra-patriarchal groups such as ISIS, but also in the process of mobilizing a popular movement for feminist social justice, change, and autonomous self-determination. This article describes the ideological and organizational principles of the women’s movement and argues that political consciousness and autonomy resulted in the elaboration of a radical freedom concept in Kurdistan.
The article offers an intellectual critique of Marxist political ecology as developed in western Europe between the 1970s and 2000s, focusing on the labour/ecology nexus. My critique is based on the intersection of two levels of analysis: (1) the historical evolution of labour environmentalism, focusing on what I will call the eco-modernist dilemma of labour; (2) the meaning of class politics in relation to the politics of the environment, with a special focus on the production/reproduction dialectic. Focusing on the work of four Marxist intellectuals whose ideas resonated with various social movements across the Left spectrum (labour, environmentalism, feminism and degrowth), the article shows how the current entrenchment of labour within the politics of eco-modernization hides a number of internal fractures and alternative visions of ecology that need to be spelled out in order to open the terrain for a rethinking of ecological politics in class terms today.
One of the most important secular political movements in the Middle East, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) underwent a profound transformation in the 2000s. What the PKK has experienced in this period was a comprehensive restructuration of its organization, ideology and political-military struggle, changing its course towards a project of radical democracy. In this article we explore the content of this new project, and its practical implications. Through this discussion, our study addresses a gap in Turkish and Kurdish studies. Only few studies deal explicitly with the political ideology of the PKK. The data for this article has been collected through a study of Öcalantextquoterights defence texts and his textquoteleftprison notestextquoteright, along with key PKK documents, such as congress reports, formal decisions and the writings of its cadre, such as Mustafa Karasu. We conclude that the project for radical democracy is based on the conception of textquoteleftpolitics beyond the state, political organisation beyond the party, and political subjectivity beyond classtextquoteright and can have the opportunity to change the centralist tradition in Turkish political system as well as the statist and class reductionist political thought in the Left in Turkey.
On the assumption that good theory is informed by praxis and vice versa, the essay brings sociological theory together with the alternative globalization movement. The responses of this emerging global civil society to contemporary environmental crises indicate that understandings of labor and value that evolved with industrial capital need to be broadened. The essay opens up this process with an outline of how capitalist production undermines its own social metabolism, a "metabolic rift," that is maintained by the ideological separation of ecology and economics. However, from a grassroots perspective, it is clear that a conceptual vacuum exists between these two disciplines-a space in which a third discourse waits to be articulated. This subliminal "other" sphere of labor and value centers on reproduction of the humanity-nature metabolism by those whose labor is marginalized by capital-unpaid caregivers, peasants, and indigenous gatherers. The terms meta-industrial labor and metabolic value spell out the material, rift-healing, contribution of this unnamed international class. The essay seeks recognition for a vernacular science, an integrated movement strategy, and more inclusive social theory.
Based on discourse analysis of journals published by Kurdish feminists, this article analyzes Kurdish feminist movements, which developed throughout the 1990s in Turkey. It goes on to indicate how Kurdish feminism represents an example of a third-wave women's movement within the Turkish context, emphasizing the dual oppression against women, namely for gender and ethnicity. Focusing on the contextual background of women's oppression, this study draws attention to the exclusion of some women from a general and essentialist understanding of women and to the possibility of an ethnic feminism as a way of alternative self-existence for those who are oppressed on grounds other than gender.
Diane Wilson, a white fisherwoman and mother of five, who, in her passionate commitment to environmental justice, set out to make Union Carbide accountable in Texas and Bhopal. Her activism transformed her from a shy, anti-social, married, mother-of-five shrimper to an outspoken, divorced, intensely committed mother-of-five effective political ecologist. This trajectory is echoed in many stories of other women who have followed similar paths as mothers, wives, or women embedded in harsh material conditions. The case of Diane Wilson and the women who followed her shows that grassroots working-class women fighting against local pollution experience a change in the way they think about themselves in relation to the public sphere. Equally, a change occurs in how family members and communities see them.
ON 17 NOVEMBER 1980 in Washington, D.C., two thousand women encircled the Pentagon, blocking entrances, weaving doors closed with brightly colored yarn, and weaving webs of yarn and ribbon that contained artifacts from their daily lives. These women also planted cardboard tombstones on the Pentagon's lawn, inscribed with the names of victims of U.S. militarism, colonialism, toxic contamination, and sexual violence. This nonviolent direct action, known as the Women's Pentagon Action, was the first explicitly "ecofeminist" action in the United States, and in it women protested against military violence, ecological violence, racism, and social, sexual, and economic violence toward women. Ecofeminism emerged in the 1970s as part of the women's liberation movement and more recently has begun being articulated in the margins of academic discourse. The term "ecofeminism" is used by some activists and academics to refer to a feminism that connects ecological degradation and the oppression of women. Much of ecofeminist direct action seeks to resist and subvert political institutions, economic structures, and daily activities that are against the interests of life on earth. Much of theoretical and academic ecofeminism seeks to identify, critique, and overthrow ideological frameworks and ways of thinking, such as value-hierarchical dualistic thinking, 1 that sanction ecological degradation and the oppression of women. Beyond this, ecofeminism seeks to bring forth different, nondominating forms of social organization and human-nature interaction. Ecofeminism does not lend itself to easy generalization. It consists of a diversity of positions, and this is reflected in the diversity of voices and modes of expression represented in ecofeminist anthologies. The ecofeminist anthologies Reclaim the Earth, 1 Healing the Wounds* and Reweaving the World* Essentialism in Ecofeminist Discourse 221 the work of women from different countries and social situations, and their work does not adhere to a single form or outlook. Poems, art, photographs, fiction, prose, as well as theoretical/philosophical/"academic" works are included. Ecofeminism's diversity is also reflected by its circulation in a variety of arenas, such as academia, grass-roots movements, conferences, books, journals, and art. Because of this diversity, I agree with the contention of ecofeminist activist and theorist Carolyn D'Cruz that it is more useful to consider ecofeminism as a discourse than as a unified, coherent epistemology. D'Cruz's view of ecofeminism as discourse is useful because it makes room for the voices of a variety of positioned subjects that share political and ethical concerns. 7 I am emphasizing the diversity within ecofeminism and the usefulness of considering ecofeminism as a discourse to illustrate that there is no epistemological position that all ecofeminists can be said to share. Ecofeminism derives its cohesion not from a unified epistemological standpoint, but more from the shared desire of its proponents to foster resistance to formations of domination for the sake of human liberation and planetary survival.
Dialectics of Struggle: Challenges to the Kurdish Women's Movement
- Nadje Al-Ali
- Latif Tas
Bookchin, Öcalan, and the Dialectics of Democracy
- Janet Biehl
Ecology Discussions and Practices in the Kurdish Freedom Struggle
- Ercan Ayboğa
How My Father’s Ideas Helped the Kurds Create a New Democracy
- Debbie Bookchin
- saed
‘Ecofeminismo en Rojava: hacia la construcción de un modelo alternativo de desarrollo económico en el territorio sirio del Kurdistán.’ [Ecofeminism in Rojava: Towards the Construction of an Alternative Model of Development in the Syrian Territory of Kurdistan
- Aguilar Silva
- S Erika
Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
- Silvia Federici
Mezopotamien Verlag e Vertriebs GmbH
- Jineolojî Committee Europe
Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. Trowbridge: Readwood Books
- Maria Mies
Liberating Life: Woman’s Revolution. London: Mesopotamia Publisher and International Initiative Edition
- Abdullah Öcalan
Manifesto della civiltà democratica Volume I: Civiltà e verità. L’era degli dei mascherati e dei Re travestiti. [Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization Volume I: Civilization. The Age of Masked Gods and Disguised Kings
- Abdullah Öcalan
Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization Volume III: The Sociology of Freedom
- Abdullah Öcalan
Confederalismo Democrático
- Necibe Queredaxîi
Why Jineology? Re-Constructing the Sciences Towards a Communal and Free Life
- Gönül Kaya
Women: The Last Colony. London: Zed Books
- Maria Mies
- Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen
- Claudia Von Werlhof